Was it former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Australian Democrat Senator Andrew Bartlett or Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull?
Who convinced Queensland’s Premier Beattie to change his mind on recycling sewage as a source of drinking water?
They have each visited my home town of Brisbane over the last week and each publicly announced their support for the concept.
Now the Premier says he’s going to put the idea to the people of Brisbane.
That is quite a back flip.
Until recently Peter Beattie had been promising new dams, desalination plants and even piping water over 1,000 kms from the Burdekin to fix Brisbane’s water shortage, but had ruled out waste water recycling. Now he says recycling is a possibility – that he will make it an election issue.
You can read about Andrew Bartlett’s petition in favor of recycling at his website and Mikhail Gorbachev and Malcolm Turnbull’s comments in The Australian here, here and here.
I attended the Brisbane Institute last night to hear Malcolm Turnbull speak and he really was eloquent. On the subject of recycled water he suggested that:
“We must learn to judge water by its quality, not its history”.
He also commented that permanent water restrictions in Brisbane make no more sense than would permanent electricity restrictions. He indicated that the current water restrictions reflected a lack of investment in infrastructure by state governments and spoke about the referendum on waste water recycling in Toowoomba this Saturday.
I wrote in support of sipping sewage in last week’s The Land and blogged on the issue last August.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.